About "Me"

Ahem, Me is in the prime of life. Me holds a PhD and is trying to be jobless. Me masquerades the time spent on the net as doing research in Artificial Intelligence. Me desists from praising 'myself', so I won't proceed further :D ...

Sunday, November 22, 2009

After complaining about it for almost a week, on thursday, I had set upon the task of clearing my desk/drawers/shelves in the lab. And, it was pretty easy. It mainly required throwing away several kilos of printed paper into the recycling bin. These pages were basically versions of my various papers, reports and thesis filled with the supervisors comments. I don't own any books in the lab and haven't stored anything much there either. So, all my stuff from the lab eventually fit into a single small backpack. It mainly contained the binded final version of the reports and thesis.

Thursday evening had the so called farewell party with my labmates and was awesome :). Oh, and how did feel to have been vacating my desk? Not very pleasant perhaps, after all, it had been somewhat my home for 3 years! Yeah, my actual house did change over this 3 year period, but my desk and my lab had been a constant...

And in 10 hours, begins the journey home! In an Airbus A380-800, that is the huge huge double decker plane :D! And with that, officially begins my joblessness vacationing period of 70 days at least. Well, not that I have done any semblance of work since the thesis corrections. It's mostly been partying and partying :D.

And now, we move onto a completely different topic. Since, I am finally trying to ease back into my voracious reading mode, here is an interesting extract:

====="You are now bored of talking to me now and you will let me pass unhindered""Gosh, good try. But I'm afraid I'm not. Actually, I'm going to eat you""You aren't scared of limes, are you?""I am frightened of nothing!""Nothing?""Nothing""Are you extremely frightened of nothing?""Absolutely terrified of it""You know, I have nothing in my pockets, would you like to see it?""No, I most definitely would not", and then he disappeared.=====Nothing matters. It most definitely does!

The above extract is from the novel I read this week "Anansi boys" by Neil Gaiman ... its a somewhat farcical, somewhat fantastical kind of comedy. Let's say, a non sci-fi Douglas Adams kind of a book.

Monday, November 16, 2009

As most of the earlier posts on this blog would attest, I used to write (to be understood as 'type'; when will these two words become synonymous rendering pen and paper into antiquity?) without any particular topic in mind. I used to ramble, falter, and continue to blabber. More often than not, the title would precede the post, even though, neither it and neither I knew what the post would end up containing. Those were the days that I didn't have to think for a post, I just had to login, click on new post and voila, the post sprung up, though, it might have been quite meandering and direction-less. But, one cannot hope to forever possess such skills. Nowadays, most of my posts start with a purpose in mind- perhaps to blog about a trip or an incident or about any such topic. Of course, the occasional abstract post and ad-hoc fictional paragraphs do make an appearance in the blog, but only seldom.

But that's not it, there are more frightening afflictions plaguing us. Lately, I have often felt the mood to ramble, to set upon a voyage of abstractness, sail across streams of incomprehensibility and type out my mood aka feelings, with gusto, in a language that is clear to all but rarely understandable to anyone. Yet, I haven't been able to do so. By the time, I am all set to start typing, I realise that my fingers have gone numb, the thoughts had fizzled away and the mood had become indecipherable. And, the post remained un-created. It faced, not a discerning audience (that's you readers, revel in this 'platitude' :P), but the ignominy of being deemed silly before it even had the chance of being born to argue its case.

Thankfully, this post suffered no such fate. It wriggled itself out into the world and is now left at its mercy. merci.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Oh, did I say I don't do tag-posts? But then, there are exceptions, especially when ordered by agentyne in her post which was followed by a tweet as well ! Though, let me warn you, this one has too many points .. way too many!

Notation: £=yes, $=maybe

01. Bought everyone in the bar a drink $$ [bought everyone I 'know' a drink] :P

70. Taken a martial arts class ££ [for a few months in school; all I learnt was the colour ranking of the belts :D ]

71. Played a video game for more than 6 hours straight ££

72. Gotten married

73. Been in a movie [no because they didn't select me, said I looked too young :P .. am not lying! it's true !!]

74. Crashed a party

75. Gotten divorced

76. Gone without food for 5 days [am sure I would die, I have no food reserves in my body anyway!]

77. Made chapatis from scratch ££ [yes yes]

78. Won first prize in a costume contest

79. Ridden a gondola in Venice

80. Gotten a tattoo

81. White water rafted

82. Been on a television news program as an "expert" $$ [well, I was interviewed by TV crews regarding my 'sci-fi' achievements and did appear on TV, though not in a panel or something! ]

83. Gotten flowers for no reason [never got flowers even when there were reasons! :P]

84. Performed on stage ££ [quite a few times, once I even had a 'double role' since a person playing another character failed to turn up and I knew all the dialogues/scenes since it was my script anyway .. ahh those school days :D]

85. Been to all states in India [this is a toughie!]

86. Recorded your own music $$ [a single song counts? without instruments? only lyrics and tune!]

Friday, November 13, 2009

./restart abstractness[about to start] ctrl-s [long break] ctrl-q [memory blank] [vocabulary found wanting]just a simple question: did you ever get anything right at the time that you desired it most? or has it always come late, too late that you no longer cared much about it?Or is it the other way round? Those that you don't manage to obtain become more and more desirable, and those that are on their way lose their attractiveness such that by the time you actually get them, you have lost most of the interest?Either ways, it's a pity, "ain't it so"?#ctrl-c

Oh! by the way, I felt like rambling the below few bits, a week after my PhD viva .. but never really got down to posting the post .. anyways, here it is [was written on 4th or 5th nov ]

A lot of people in the lab are apparently aware of me and my name. People who I never thought knew my name (and hence couldn't have really figure out who passed their defence just through the mail announcement) are coming up to congratulate me. What can I say, some people are more popular that they thought themselves to be :P.

Almost a week of partying .. finally ends with monday of work. Oh yeah, I still have some work left, namely, the post-viva corrections that ought to be done for the final hard-bound submission. Monday was spent in work from like 11am to 11pm (with breaks ofcourse :D) And then a rigorous tuesday evening of work .. and voila, they were all done! and then after ratification from the examiners+supervisors, will have to give for the hard-binding which will take 7-10 days!! No idea, why it should take that long !!